[Looking4Truth]

I've just about had it. Why, you say? It's this constant 'leapfrogging' of technology. I worked in the IT world for almost 20 years. I learned programming in 1985 on a 1960's Honeywell H-6000 mainframe computer that took up a whole climate-controlled, generator-backed building and had disk drives the size of washing machines. For you 'kiddies' here, this was a 'text only' environment. The technology just wasn't there yet for graphics, much less video and what you all call the 'internet' the GUI 'interface to the intenet' which has been around longer than you have been alive even though thru your public school education you don't even know that.

Here's my problem. Nearly every time I pull up a web page it loads and loads and loads a bunch of useless crap and advertisements that I have NO use for or WILL EVER RESPOND TO! Half the time I get an error about a 'wayward' SCRIPT that forces me to restart the browser or in some cases the whole damn system.

My hardware has been functioning perfectly since 2004 and I am too damn cheap to upgrade it to accomodate your memory hogging crap. (That includes the damn 'upgrades' to every piece of software in existence from the operating system to the simplest piece of application software. Most of you 'script kiddies' don't even know the distinction between those two types of software.)

Now the sites are pandering to 'social media'. If you want to give feedback to most major corporations, they don't even have their own websites advertised anymore, it's 'find us on facebook/putcorpnamehere. I'll be damned if I'm going to start a f**king facebook account just to get in touch with some business. How much like lemmings are these idiots anyway? Don't they realise that not everyone on the planet depends on their facebook account to breathe?

Back to you script kiddies. Can you be bothered to sit down to a meal and eat for 10, 20, 30 minutes (BTW, a nice 5 course meal lasts at least an hour if not more, and you can sit badk and ENJOY IT with NO DISTRACTIONS) without 'texting' or 'browsing' or 'social networking'?

Call me an old bastard or behind the 'times' but my quality of life is better than yours, I guarantee!

[P.O.E.]

Oh, and this is what passed for "connectivity" (basically sending batch files to the distant mainframe)

[jakerobins]

Every time I try to rant like this younger people look at me with a puzzled look and I imagine that I look like SNL Angry Old Man.....Flobbldy Flee In my day we used modems that would take 2 days to connect to the internet AND WE LIKED IT! LOL.....

[Vietnam Vet From New Mexico]

I started on a Honeywell 200 in the 6
0’s

[Ol' Sox]

You old coot! Keep those kids of your lawn!

When I see threads like this, I'm tempted to join in - I've got the bonafides - started in '77 coding a COBOL Accounts Receivable system for Management Science America. Went on to work with some of the folks at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, as a tech rep pushing a new-fangled relational database management system and 4GL called Nomad. It was based on the relational model developed by Date and Codd. I was once told that Chris Date actually looked at some of the work I had done when he was visiting the Watson Center and nodded. Helped some friendly folks at the Dept. of the Navy learn another rdbms named Focus. Visited Bell Labs in Princeton in the early 80's where they showed me how they could access and process and print information with an RF network! Magic! Installed an IBM PC LAN in a Fortune 500 company - one of the first ones IBM sold commercially. Met Ozzie when he was at Iris. Met Kapor. Saw Lotus Notes pre-release 1.0 and installed Notes 1.1 at the company I worked for. I've specialized in the Collaborative Software stack ever since and these days work in product development IT for a really really big enterprise software company that eats other companies for breakfast. I'm one of the geeks' geeks. I frackin' love it. Tried management for a few years in the middle of my career, but I'm an engineer - need to keep my hands in it. Half the guys I work with have PhD's and the other half, like me, are ADhDs who just love to tweak things and break things and fix them up, ultimately resulting in production systems that give almost 5 x 9's reliability.

When script kiddies come on my lawn, I use facial recognition, tag them, then post fotos of them to their own FB pages. Damn kids. Heh.

[Alas Babylon!]

My fisrt mainframe: The Philco Ford 1000~~~

NORAD, Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado, circa 1976.

AS a young Airman Basic, I learned to run this all by myself. The tape drives used one inch reel tapes, none of that new-fangled 1/2 inch 9 track! Note the card punch on the lower left.

We called that computer room "Offline", because we loaded jobs via punch card to tape, and the tapes were carried by tape librarians or "tape apes" to the "Online" system.

Online looked like this:

This was used for both Space Track and Missile Warning missions.

All of these were replaced by Honeywell 6080's in 1979 (but the chick did not come with it).

Sigh... The good ole days!

[PAR35]

Run Ghostery and NoScript on Firefox, and you’ll have a start on getting control again.

[ThomasThomas]

Would you happen to have a 30cm piece of wire?

[PastorBooks]

“Half the time I get an error about a ‘wayward’ SCRIPT that forces me to restart the browser “

The NoScript plugin for Firefox is excellent at keeping heavy Javascript scripts from slowing down pages. If you want to restore functionality to a page you can select what you want with an easy-to-use button menu.

[djf]

Twenty years?

Newbie!!

Jus kiddin (sorta) I started programming in ‘72.

But I agree. Javascript is the most damnable heresy that ever came to computing. And all the things they promised it would not do, like infect or corrupt your computer, it manages to do perfectly well, every day!

[Little Ray]

Y’know, if you use Firefox, (might want to avoid the current version, though...), you can get plugins to screen out a lot of that stuff.